Archive for October 12th, 2017

The reaction after every mass shooting follows a predictable script written by progressives to serve their political agenda. No claim about the efficacy of gun control, no matter how many times repudiated by facts, can stop the Dems and their media spaniels from ritually invoking it to demonize conservatives.

Why should we be surprised? By now it should be clear that the “party of science” is interested not in truth and evidence, but in ideology and partisan advantage. Yet those with common sense and an awareness of the facts still have to restate the obvious, even though it will make no difference to partisans either ignorant of or indifferent to any reality that doesn’t serve their interests. For what is at stake is not just one right, but the foundations of our political freedom in self-evident, God-given rights.

We all know the worn-out ideas that the progressives predictably trot out after every massacre. And we know they are fallacious. More guns do not lead to more gun murder. Between 1993 and 2013, private gun ownership increased 56%, and gun homicides declined 49%. No, the point is not that more guns account for the declines, a straw-man correlation the media burns down to discredit this fact. The point is, the left’s call for more gun control after every mass shooting implies that fewer guns or more regulations would decrease murder rates. Not only is that idea false, the opposite is true: higher murder rates invariably follow more gun control.

“Common sense regulations” is another nostrum of the left. We’ve had several laboratories for testing this hypothesis––Chicago, D.C., Baltimore, and most blue-state big cities have strict controls on guns, at the same time they have some of the highest rates of gun deaths. That’s because regulations on firearms are effective only for law-abiding citizens who don’t need such restraints. But for criminals they are “parchment barriers” easily ignored. If such government regulations were effective, we wouldn’t still be waging a decades-long war on drugs, which hasn’t stopped any teenager in America from getting any drug he wants. It’s unclear how the most draconian restrictions on gun ownership would be any more effective than the numerous laws that have failed to keep drugs from pouring into our country and being widely distributed.

Most important, the left is indifferent to the fact that the Constitution explicitly states that citizens have the right to “keep and bear arms.” Like all the enumerated rights, this one is not a gift of government, but an “inalienable” right, like the right of self-defense, we possess by virtue of being a human being. The bar for restricting these rights is very high, as it is for the right to free speech.

But the left has always despised the notion of natural rights and consider them a relic of our more ignorant and superstitious past, not to mention a check on their desire to concentrate and expand the government’s power. Contrary to the belief that rights are gifts of “nature and nature’s God,” the progressives argue that a benevolent government should create rights compatible with the its alleged purpose to achieve “equality” and “social justice.” Hence Franklin Roosevelt’s “new bill of rights,” which was promulgated in his 1944 State of the Union address, and included a “useful and remunerative job” and “adequate medical care”––good things to have, but not rights properly understood. But if government can invent such “rights,” the government can also modify or eliminate those it now deems have become dangerous anachronisms or impediments to social improvement.

After the Las Vegas massacre, the Daily Kos gave a typical example of this sentiment:

America needs to declare total war on guns, and that means reinterpreting or repealing the Second Amendment. The latter would be best. There is no sane reason why you or I should be granted the sacred and inviolable right to bear pistols, shotguns, automatic rifles, submachine guns, machine guns, flamethrowers, grenade launchers, anti-tank guns, and other “hunting and self-defense tools.”